Hot off the presses, some pics of Lily outside. She hates it, and I had to tamp down an area for her to go to the bathroom.

Jonathan Alter on Countdown last night Tuesday night (via Steve Benen, who also criticizes Alter):

“I think [Republicans are] in a place now where they just want to hurt Obama.

“And what they don’t get—I wish they would look into their souls a little bit—is that if they convey over and over again that the president of the United States is weak, what does that do? It emboldens the terrorists, and I don’t say that lightly.

I understand that Senate obstructionism may get in the way of Obama’s ability to conduct foreign policy. But emboldening terrorists? Osama bin Laden wakes up one morning, sees Richard Shelby has put a hold on 70 nominees and says “now is the day that we strike”? There’s absolutely no evidence that Al Qaeda thinks in these terms at all.

It’s not just that “shut up, the terrorists are listening” is essentially anti-free speech and anti-democratic, it’s that it doesn’t make any sense as a strategy.

It was dumb when Congressional Democrats were attacked in this way and it’s dumb when Congressional Republicans are attacked this way.

Even if we can’t use the word “retarded” anymore, at least we’re still allowed to torture and execute mentally disabled people.

(A little dark for a Saturday morning, I realize. But it’s true.)

This story is not getting as much attention as one would think in the American media, but Greece, Spain and Portugal are facing major financial crises that may end with the countries defaulting on their debt. If this happens, you can be pretty sure that the deficit scolds will use this as cautionary tale, e.g. “don’t let us be like Spain, enact `entitlement reform’ now”, etc.

Krugman points out that Spain’s budgetary practices have not been particularly irresponsible, that in fact they were running a surplus when the economy was good:

As Europe is roiled by sovereign debt fears, it’s important to realize that the crisis in the largest of the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain) has nothing to do with fiscal irresponsibility. On the eve of the crisis, Spain was running a budget surplus; its debts, as you can see in the figure above, were low relative to GDP.

So what happened? Spain is an object lesson in the problems of having monetary union without fiscal and labor market integration. First, there was a huge boom in Spain, largely driven by a housing bubble — and financed by capital outflows from Germany. This boom pulled up Spanish wages. Then the bubble burst, leaving Spanish labor overpriced relative to Germany and France, and precipitating a surge in unemployment. It also led to large Spanish budget deficits, mainly because of collapsing revenue but also due to efforts to limit the rise in unemployment.

There is a little bit of snow outside.

John Cook at Gawker has a point-by-point teardown of Fox News’ “fair and balanced” editing of the underwhelming-on-the-air “faceoff” between Jon Stewart and Lord Falafel. “I’m Not Saying Your Mother’s A Whore: How Fox News Censored Jon Stewart vs. Bill O’Reilly” :

Fox News has generously placed the full, unedited conversation between Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart online, so we can see precisely how unfairly and deviously Fox edited the interview in order to weaken Stewart’s case: A lot!

Last night on his show—Part Two of a ludicrously overhyped “faceoff” between O’Reilly and Stewart in which Stewart attempted, among other things, to present a critique of Fox as a fear-mongering GOP messaging operation—O’Reilly boasted that his edit of their 42-minute interview for broadcast was “a fair cut” and invited viewers to have a look at the unedited version online to judge for themselves: “Some of these idiots in the press who hate us, ‘O’Reilly cut the interview to make Stewart look’—OK, all of that is bull. It’s a fair cut. And then when you watch the cut and watch the whole interview you’ll see it.”

So we took him up on the offer, and guess what? If by “fair cut” O’Reilly means “cut in a manner that left some of Stewart’s best lines, most effective arguments, and most convincing evidence out of the interview and hidden from the broadcast audience,” then he’s absolutely right…

And to watch the Fox News cut of this exchange, you’d think O’Reilly scored a minor point by mocking Stewart’s repeated use of the word “cyclonic”

O’REILLY: Cavuto sane?
STEWART: Being the thinnest kid at fat camp. So let’s just get that straight. Here is what Fox has done through their cyclonic, perpetual…
O’REILLY: We’re back to the cyclonic.
STEWART: Their cyclonic perpetual emotion machine that is a 24-hour a day, 7-day a week. They’ve taken reasonable concerns about this president and this economy and turned it into a full-fledged panic attack about the next coming of Chairman Mao. Explain to me why that is the narrative of your network?

Here’s what Stewart really said about Neil Cavuto’s practice of raising “Is Obama a Stalinist?”-style questions:

I know what this is. I come from Jersey—it’s the same thing: “I’m not saying your mother’s a whore. I’m just saying she has sex for money. With people.” [F]ox News used to be all about, you don’t criticize a president during wartime. It’s unacceptable, it’s treasonous, it gives aid and comfort to the enemy. All of a sudden, for some reason you can run out there and say, “Barack Obama is destroying the fabric of this country.”

Ah yes—the Cavuto Mark in all its glory!

Read the whole thing. The Gawker staff deserves great credit for, as the saying goes, watching these idiots so we don’t have to, and for exploring Fox’s bad-faith chop job at length. Comments are well worth reading, too—including, I suppose, the Fox apologist who whines “The rife condescension in this thread is exactly why more people watch Fox than the Big Three. Obviously, the bulk of Fox’s viewers don’t really sweat the fact it’s a right-leaning outlet, just like the Big Three viewers don’t sweat the left-of-center bias. Fox’s viewers watch Fox because it’s the one place in the MSM they don’t get called stupid all day long.”

As you may have heard it is snowing in the Mid-Atlantic. I settled in and watched Dr. Zhivago and when it ended I checked the outside world:

My crude measurements tell me that 11 to 12 inches have fallen already in about eight hours:

And I’m told to expect another 12 to 16 hours of snowfall. This should be a memorable Saturday in old Mobtown.

And yes, this is a late night Open Thread.

Cheers

dengre

Got busy reading with the Dog Whisperer on in the background and forgot all about Caprica. It occurred to me tonight that I have watched that show so many times I am developing a parasocial relationship… with his dogs. Hands down, Daddy is my favorite.

In other news, I’ve gotten about 6-7 inches (Update: OF SNOW, PERVS) in four hours. If it keeps up like this, we will definitely end up with well over a foot of snow in the morning.

It finally started snowing here, and it is coming down really, really hard after several hours of freezing rain, and now it is sticking, so I’m imagining the roads are going to be a DISASTER in no time. Which means I can sit in the living room and look out and count the idiots who decided this was the perfect time to attempt to drive their car up the hill.

The best part of this activity is watching the knuckleheads who, despite seeing four other cars in a ditch at the base of the hill, decide that somehow they are different and they will be able to defy gravity, ice, and snow. And then they start up the hill, eventually start sliding, and determine their only option is to back up slowly down the hill, at which point they lose control and slowly slide into the other cars at the bottom of the hill.

If everyone was required to live near the bottom of a hill for a year during winter and could see what I have seen the past few years, there would be a lot fewer accidents in inclement weather
.

I don’t think New York Magazine’s epithet for Alabama’s Latest Shame is quite specific enough, because who north of the Mason-Dixon line knows which is the “Cotton State”? But they absolutely have found the best Getty photo of Shelby Steal, so you should give them the click and go admire it for yourselves.

Ezra Klein’s ransom note is pretty good, too.

Other potential labels from our brilliant BJ commentariat:

Senator Crimson Bribe
Sen. French Connection
The Alabama Extortionist
Senator Porkwall
Senator Squeegee Man
The ‘Bama Blackmailer
Sen. Earmarks-for-Airbus
Sen. Shellgame
The ‘Bama Scammer
Sen. “Roll Bribe!”
Shelby the French Privateer
Sen. Shelby (R-Toyota / Airbus)

And finally: “... has ‘traitor’ been taken?”

Choose a favorite below, or add your own!

Shortly after Senator Brown #2 abandoned his much-advertised pickup truck for the plush chauffered limos of DeeCee, there was a five-alarm tire fire back in his home town. Shortly after Scotty was sworn in, gleeful weatherpersons started predicting up to 24 inches of snow in the nation’s capital… and maybe an inch, or so, in the southern half of Massachusetts.

Assuming the forecasters are correct, we Massholes definitely got the better end of this particular deal with Pat Robertson’s devil. We have both firefighters and snow removal equipment here in New England.

It appears the teabaggers have stumbled upon the missing ingredient that will make their movement more palatable to the public at large- xenophobia:

The Tea Party movement has energized activism against President Obama’s vision for immigration reform.

The link between tea partiers and immigration politics developed last summer, when the impact of illegal immigration on the health care system became a prominent side issue in town hall debates.

Since then, illegal immigration has steadily gained ground on the Tea Party agenda.

Immigration “is one of our main issues in the state of North Carolina,” said David DeGerolamo, co-founder of Tea Party group NC Freedom, in a phone interview. “And what it comes down to is that the United States is a republic based on the rule of law. What part of illegal is right?”

DeGerolamo is scheduled to give a talk today on “How to Unite State Tea Party Groups” at the National Tea Party Convention, which began yesterday in Nashville.

The Nashville event has devoted a good share of its spotlight to activists devoted to promoting get-tough policies against illegal immigrants and blocking White House plans to offer a path to legal status for the nation’s 12 million undocumented immigrants.

I’m sure this is related to their anti-corporate stance.

And one of these days, can we stop calling them teabaggers and call them what they really are- Republicans.

*** Update ***

Then you have this:

The opening-night speaker at first ever National Tea Party Convention ripped into President Obama, Sen. John McCain and “the cult of multiculturalism,” asserting that Obama was elected because “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country.”

What about a poll tax, Tancredo?

Some idiot at Kaplan today (in a piece about how liberals are condescending):

It follows that the thinkers, politicians and citizens who advance conservative ideas must be dupes, quacks or hired guns selling stories they know to be a sham. In this spirit, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman regularly dismisses conservative arguments not simply as incorrect, but as lies. Writing last summer, Krugman pondered the duplicity he found evident in 35 years’ worth of Wall Street Journal editorial writers. “What do these people really believe? I mean, they’re not stupid—life would be a lot easier if they were. So they know they’re not telling the truth. But they obviously believe that their dishonesty serves a higher truth. . . . The question is, what is that higher truth? What do these people really believe in?”

In Krugman’s condescending world, there is no need to take seriously the arguments of “these people”—only to plumb the depths of their errors and ponder their hidden motivations.

How is this condescending at all? If I call someone a liar and then say “I know you’re not dumb, so why are you telling this ridiculous lie”, how is that condescending?

It’s a strange political world we live in, where pointing out, however politely, that someone is lying makes you uppity and condescending. And where people write entire pieces complaining about how “their side” is called liars without in any way defending themselves from the charge. And where a once serious newspaper publishes all of this.

No comment.

The ad, called “12 inches of Global Warming” is specifically targeting Reps. Rick Boucher (D-VA) and Tom Perriello (D-VA) in advance of the fall midterm elections.

The number of mentions at Reason’s Hit and Run about Shelby’s hostage crisis for billions: ZERO

Number of mentions of Nelson’s 100 million dollar deal for HCR? You count ‘em. I have shit to do.

Predicted glibertarian response should they even notice: “Hey, we are all in favor of anything that shuts down government!”

There is a reason folks think you all are Republican strategists.

*** Update ***

Good on Captain Ed, though.

Much to my surprise, Reason comes out against this! Cue the Hallelujah chorus.